Universe

But the UNIVERSE outside; how is it aligned towards the Good? The soulless by direction toward Soul: Soul towards the Good itself, through the Intellectual-Principle. Enneads I,7,

With this, we would have no longer the distinction of one order, the heavenly system, stable for ever, and another, the earthly, in process of decay: all would be alike except in the point of time; the celestial would merely be longer lasting. If, then, we accepted this duration of type alone as a true account of the All equally with its partial members, our difficulties would be eased – or indeed we should have no further problem – once the Will of God were shown to be capable, under these conditions and by such communication, of sustaining the UNIVERSE. Enneads: II I

But all the stars are serviceable to the UNIVERSE, and therefore can stand to each other only as the service of the UNIVERSE demands, in a harmony like that observed in the members of any one animal form. They exist essentially for the purpose of the UNIVERSE, just as the gall exists for the purposes of the body as a whole not less than for its own immediate function: it is to be the inciter of the animal spirits but without allowing the entire organism and its own especial region to run riot. Some such balance of function was indispensable in the All – bitter with sweet. There must be differentiation – eyes and so forth – but all the members will be in sympathy with the entire animal frame to which they belong. Only so can there be a unity and a total harmony. Enneads II,3,

This is a separatist theory, tenable only by minds ignorant of the nature of a UNIVERSE which has a ruling principle and a first cause operative downwards through every member. Enneads II,3,

Soul, then, in the same way, is intent upon a task of its own; alike in its direct course and in its divagation it is the cause of all by its possession of the Thought of the FirsFirst Principle: thus a Law of Justice goes with all that exists in the UNIVERSE which, otherwise, would be dissolved, and is perdurable because the entire fabric is guided as much by the orderliness as by the power of the controlling force. And in this order the stars, as being no minor members of the heavenly system, are co-operators contributing at once to its stately beauty and to its symbolic quality. Their symbolic power extends to the entire realm of sense, their efficacy only to what they patently do. Enneads II,3,

For our part, nature keeps us upon the work of the Soul as long as we are not wrecked in the multiplicity of the UNIVERSE: once thus sunk and held we pay the penalty, which consists both in the fall itself and in the lower rank thus entailed upon us: riches and poverty are caused by the combinations of external fact. Enneads II,3,

But (with every allowance to the lower forces) all follows either upon that Highest or rather upon the Beings about It – we may think of the Divine as a fire whose outgoing warmth pervades the UNIVERSE – or upon whatsoever is transmitted by the one<one Soul (the divine first Soul) to the other, its Kin (the Soul of any particular being). All that is graceless is admixture. For the UNIVERSE is in truth a thing of blend, and if we separate from it that separable Soul, the residue is little. The All is a God when the divine Soul is counted in with it; “the rest,” we read, “is a mighty spirit and its ways are subdivine.” Enneads II,3,

The gist of the whole matter lies in the consideration that Soul governs this All by the plan contained in the Reason-Principle and plays in the All exactly the part of the particular principle which in every living-thing forms the members of the organism and adjusts them to the unity of which they are portions; the entire force of the Soul is represented in the All, but, in the parts, Soul is present only in proportion to the degree of essential reality held by each of such partial objects. Surrounding every separate entity there are other entities, whose approach will sometimes be hostile and sometimes helpful to the purpose of its nature; but to the All taken in its length and breadth each and every separate existent is an adjusted part, holding its own characteristic and yet contributing by its own native tendency to the entire life-history of the UNIVERSE. Enneads II,3,

Well, perhaps even the less good has its contributory value in the All. Perhaps there is no need that everything be good. Contraries may co-operate; and without opposites there could be no ordered UNIVERSE: all living beings of the partial realm include contraries. The better elements are compelled into existence and moulded to their function by the Reason-Principle directly; the less good are potentially present in the Reason-Principles, actually present in the phenomena themselves; the Soul’s power had reached its limit, and failed to bring the Reason-Principles into complete actuality since, amid the clash of these antecedent Principles, Matter had already from its own stock produced the less good. Enneads II,3,

Are the evils in the UNIVERSE necessary because it is of later origin than the Higher Sphere? Perhaps rather because without evil the All would be incomplete. For most or even all forms of evil serve the UNIVERSE – much as the poisonous snake has its use – though in most cases their function is unknown. Vice itself has many useful sides: it brings about much that is beautiful, in artistic creations for example, and it stirs us to thoughtful living, not allowing us to drowse in security. Enneads II,3,

To a certain school, body-forms exclusively are the Real Beings; existence is limited to bodies; there is one only Matter, the stuff underlying the primal-constituents of the UNIVERSE: existence is nothing but this Matter: everything is some modification of this; the elements of the UNIVERSE are simply this Matter in a certain condition. Enneads II,4,

If He made it later than this world – abstracting the formal-idea of this world and leaving the Matter out – the Souls that have come to know that intermediate sphere would have experienced enough to keep them from entering this. If the meaning is simply that Souls exhibit the Ideal-Form of the UNIVERSE, what is there distinctive in the teaching? Enneads: II VIII.

Misunderstanding their text, they conceived one Mind passively including within itself all that has being, another mind, a distinct existence, having vision, and a third planning the UNIVERSE – though often they substitute Soul for this planning Mind as the creating Principle – and they think that this third being is the Creator according to Plato. Enneads: II VIII.

As a matter of fact the ancient doctrine of the Divine Essences was far the sounder and more instructed, and must be accepted by all not caught in the delusions that beset humanity: it is easy also to identify what has been conveyed in these later times from the ancients with incongruous novelties – how for example, where they must set up a contradictory doctrine, they introduce a medley of generation and destruction, how they cavil at the UNIVERSE, how they make the Soul blameable for the association with body, how they revile the Administrator of this All, how they ascribe to the Creator, identified with the Soul, the character and experiences appropriate to partial be beings. Enneads: II VIII.

But to treat the human Soul as a fair presentment of the Soul of the UNIVERSE is like picking out potters and blacksmiths and making them warrant for discrediting an entire well-ordered city. Enneads: II VIII.

But the Soul of the UNIVERSE cannot be in bond to what itself has bound: it is sovereign and therefore immune of the lower things, over which we on the contrary are not masters. That in it which is directed to the Divine and Transcendent is ever unmingled, knows no encumbering; that in it which imparts life to the body admits nothing bodily to itself. It is the general fact that an inset (as the Body), necessarily shares the conditions of its containing principle (as the Soul), and does not communicate its own conditions where that principle has an independent life: thus a graft will die if the stock dies, but the stock will live on by its proper life though the graft wither. The fire within your own self may be quenched, but the thing, fire, will exist still; and if fire itself were annihilated that would make no difference to the Soul, the Soul in the Supreme, but only to the plan of the material world; and if the other elements sufficed to maintain a Kosmos, the Soul in the Supreme would be unconcerned. Enneads: II VIII.

Even in the administration of the UNIVERSE there is no ground for such attack, for it affords manifest proof of the greatness of the Intellectual Kind. Enneads: II VIII.

This All that has emerged into life is no amorphous structure – like those lesser forms within it which are born night and day out of the lavishness of its vitality – the UNIVERSE is a life organized, effective, complex, all-comprehensive, displaying an unfathomable wisdom. How, then, can anyone deny that it is a clear image, beautifully formed, of the Intellectual Divinities? No doubt it is copy, not original; but that is its very nature; it cannot be at once symbol and reality. But to say that it is an inadequate copy is false; nothing has been left out which a beautiful representation within the physical order could include. Enneads: II VIII.

Since there is no UNIVERSE nobler than this, is it not clear what this must be? A representation carrying down the features of the Intellectual Realm is necessary; there is no other Kosmos than this; therefore this is such a representation. Enneads: II VIII.

Knowledge, too; in their unbroken peace, what hinders them from the intellectual grasp of the God-Head and the Intellectual Gods? What can be imagined to give us a wisdom higher than belongs to the Supernals? Could anyone, not fallen to utter folly, bear with such an idea? Admitting that human Souls have descended under constraint of the All-Soul, are we to think the constrained the nobler? Among Souls, what commands must be higher than what obeys. And if the coming was unconstrained, why find fault with a world you have chosen and can quit if you dislike it? And further, if the order of this UNIVERSE is such that we are able, within it, to practise wisdom and to live our earthly course by the Supernal, does not that prove it a dependency of the Divine? Enneads: II VIII.

This UNIVERSE, too, exists by Him and looks to Him – the UNIVERSE as a whole and every God within it – and tells of Him to men, all alike revealing the plan and will of the Supreme. Enneads: II VIII.

Another point: God has care for you; how then can He be indifferent to the entire UNIVERSE in which you exist? We may be told that He is too much occupied to look upon the UNIVERSE, and that it would not be right for Him to do so; yet, when He looks down and upon these people, is He not looking outside Himself and upon the UNIVERSE in which they exist? If He cannot look outside Himself so as to survey the Kosmos, then neither does He look upon them. Enneads: II VIII.

But they have no need of Him? The UNIVERSE has need of Him, and He knows its ordering and its indwellers and how far they belong to it and how far to the Supreme, and which of the men upon it are friends of God, mildly acquiescing with the Kosmic dispensation when in the total course of things some pain must be brought to them – for we are to look not to the single will of any man but to the universe entire, regarding every one according to worth but not stopping for such things where all that may is hastening onward. Enneads: II VIII.

If, on the other hand, the Soul keeps to its own place and illuminates the lower without directing any act towards that end, why should it alone be the illuminant? Why should not the Kosmos draw light also from the yet greater powers contained in the total of existence? Again, if the Soul possesses the plan of a UNIVERSE, and by virtue of this plan illuminates it, why do not that illumination and the creating of the world take place simultaneously? Why must the Soul wait till the representations of the plan be made actual? Then again this Plan – the “Far Country” of their terminology – brought into being, as they hold, by the greater powers, could not have been the occasion of decline to the creators. Enneads: II VIII.

Another difficulty: These people come upon earth not as Soul-Images but as veritable Souls; yet, by great stress and strain, one or two of them are able to stir beyond the limits of the world, and when they do attain Reminiscence barely carry with them some slight recollection of the Sphere they once knew: on the other hand, this Image, a new-comer into being, is able, they tell us – as also is its Mother – to form at least some dim representation of the celestial world. It is an Image, stamped in Matter, yet it not merely has the conception of the Supreme and adopts from that world the plan of this, but knows what elements serve the purpose. How, for instance, did it come to make fire before anything else? What made it judge fire a better first than some other object? Again, if it created the fire of the UNIVERSE by thinking of fire, why did it not make the UNIVERSE at a stroke by thinking of the UNIVERSE? It must have conceived the product complete from the first; the constituent elements would be embraced in that general conception. Enneads: II VIII.

The creation must have been in all respects more according to the way of Nature than to that of the arts – for the arts are of later origin than Nature and the UNIVERSE, and even at the present stage the partial things brought into being by the natural Kinds do not follow any such order – first fire, then the several other elements, then the various blends of these – on the contrary the living organism entire is encompassed and rounded off within the uterine germ. Why should not the material of the UNIVERSE be similarly embraced in a Kosmic Type in which earth, fire and the rest would be included? We can only suppose that these people themselves, acting by their more authentic Soul, would have produced the world by such a process, but that the Creator had not wit to do so. Enneads: II VIII.

What sort of piety can make Providence stop short of earthly concerns or set any limit whatsoever to it? And what consistency is there in this school when they proceed to assert that Providence cares for them, though for them alone? And is this Providence over them to be understood of their existence in that other world only or of their lives here as well? If in the other world, how came they to this? If in this world, why are they not already raised from it? Again, how can they deny that the Lord of Providence is here? How else can He know either that they are here, or that in their sojourn here they have not forgotten Him and fallen away? And if He is aware of the goodness of some, He must know of the wickedness of others, to distinguish good from bad. That means that He is present to all, is, by whatever mode, within this UNIVERSE. The UNIVERSE, therefore, must be participant in Him. Enneads: II VIII.

If He is absent from the UNIVERSE, He is absent from yourselves, and you can have nothing to tell about Him or about the powers that come after Him. Enneads: II VIII.

But, allowing that a Providence reaches to you from the world beyond – making any concession to your liking – it remains none the less certain that this world holds from the Supernal and is not deserted and will not be: a Providence watching entires is even more likely than one over fragments only; and similarly, Participation is more perfect in the case of the All-Soul – as is shown, further, by the very existence of things and the wisdom manifest in their existence. Of those that advance these wild pretensions, who is so well ordered, so wise, as the UNIVERSE? The comparison is laughable, utterly out of place; to make it, except as a help towards truth, would be impiety. Enneads: II VIII.

The very question can be entertained by no intelligent being but only by one so blind, so utterly devoid of perception and thought, so far from any vision of the Intellectual UNIVERSE as not even to see this world of our own. Enneads: II VIII.

Then let them for the moment pass over the corporeal element in the UNIVERSE and study all that still remains. Enneads: II VIII.

They will think of the Intellectual Sphere which includes within itself the Ideal-Form realized in the Kosmos. They will think of the Souls, in their ordered rank, that produce incorporeal magnitude and lead the Intelligible out towards spatial extension, so that finally the thing of process becomes, by its magnitude, as adequate a representation as possible of the principle void of parts which is its model – the greatness of power there being translated here into greatness of bulk. Then whether they think of the Kosmic Sphere (the All-Soul) as already in movement under the guidance of that power of God which holds it through and through, beginning and middle and end, or whether they consider it as in rest and exercising as yet no outer governance: either approach will lead to a true appreciation of the Soul that conducts this UNIVERSE. Enneads: II VIII.

Suppose the atoms to exist: These atoms are to move, one downwards – admitting a down and an up – another slant-wise, all at haphazard, in a confused conflict. Nothing here is orderly; order has not come into being, though the outcome, this UNIVERSE, when it achieves existence, is all order; and thus prediction and divination are utterly impossible, whether by the laws of the science – what science can operate where there is no order? – or by divine possession and inspiration, which no less require that the future be something regulated. Enneads: III I

Another theory: The UNIVERSE is permeated by one Soul, Cause of all things and events; every separate phenomenon as a member of a whole moves in its place with the general movement; all the various causes spring into action from one source: therefore, it is argued, the entire descending claim of causes and all their interaction must follow inevitably and so constitute a universal determination. A plant rises from a root, and we are asked on that account to reason that not only the interconnection linking the root to all the members and every member to every other but the entire activity and experience of the plant, as well, must be one organized overruling, a “destiny” of the plant. Enneads: III I

The doctrine is close to that which makes the Soul of the UNIVERSE the source and cause of all condition and of all movement whether without or – supposing that we are allowed as individuals some little power towards personal act – within ourselves. Enneads: III I

What can this other cause be; one standing above those treated of; one that leaves nothing causeless, that preserves sequence and order in the UNIVERSE and yet allows ourselves some reality and leaves room for prediction and augury? Soul: we must place at the crest of the world of beings, this other Principle, not merely the Soul of the UNIVERSE but, included in it, the Soul of the individual: this, no mean Principle, is needed to be the bond of union in the total of things, not, itself, a thing sprung like things from life-seeds, but a first-hand Cause, bodiless and therefore supreme over itself, free, beyond the reach of kosmic Cause: for, brought into body, it would not be unrestrictedly sovereign; it would hold rank in a series. Enneads: III I

To make the existence and coherent structure of this UNIVERSE depend upon automatic activity and upon chance is against all good sense. Enneads III,2,

Of course the belief that after a certain lapse of time a Kosmos previously non-existent came into being would imply a foreseeing and a reasoned plan on the part of God providing for the production of the UNIVERSE and securing all possible perfection in it – a guidance and partial providence, therefore, such as is indicated. But since we hold the eternal existence of the UNIVERSE, the utter absence of a beginning to it, we are forced, in sound and sequent reasoning, to explain the providence ruling in the UNIVERSE as a universal consonance with the divine Intelligence to which the Kosmos is subsequent not in time but in the fact of derivation, in the fact that the Divine Intelligence, preceding it in Kind, is its cause as being the Archetype and Model which it merely images, the primal by which, from all eternity, it has its existence and subsistence. Enneads III,2,

So from this, the One Intellectual Principle, and the Reason-Form emanating from it, our UNIVERSE rises and develops part, and inevitably are formed groups concordant and helpful in contrast with groups discordant and combative; sometimes of choice and sometimes incidentally, the parts maltreat each other; engendering proceeds by destruction. Enneads III,2,

Yet: Amid all that they effect and accept, the divine Realm imposes the one harmonious act; each utters its own voice, but all is brought into accord, into an ordered system, for the universal purpose, by the ruling Reason-Principle. This UNIVERSE is not Intelligence and Reason, like the Supernal, but participant in Intelligence and Reason: it stands in need of the harmonizing because it is the meeting ground of Necessity and divine Reason-Necessity pulling towards the lower, towards the unreason which is its own characteristic, while yet the Intellectual Principle remains sovereign over it. Enneads III,2,

Similarly, the very wronging of man by man may be derived from an effort towards the Good; foiled, in their weakness, of their true desire, they turn against each other: still, when they do wrong, they pay the penalty – that of having hurt their Souls by their evil conduct and of degradation to a lower place – for nothing can ever escape what stands decreed in the law of the UNIVERSE. Enneads III,2,

Now, once Happiness is possible at all to Souls in this UNIVERSE, if some fail of it, the blame must fall not upon the place but upon the feebleness insufficient to the staunch combat in the one arena where the rewards of excellence are offered. Men are not born divine; what wonder that they do not enjoy a divine life. And poverty and sickness mean nothing to the good – only to the evil are they disastrous – and where there is body there must be ill health. Enneads III,2,

Holding, therefore, as we do, despite all, that the UNIVERSE lies under an Intellectual Principle whose power has touched every existent, we cannot be absolved from the attempt to show in what way the detail of this sphere is just. Enneads III,2,

A preliminary observation: in looking for excellence in this thing of mixture, the Kosmos, we cannot require all that is implied in the excellence of the unmingled; it is folly to ask for Firsts in the Secondary, and since this UNIVERSE contains body, we must allow for some bodily influence upon the total and be thankful if the mingled existent lack nothing of what its nature allowed it to receive from the Divine Reason. Enneads III,2,

Now in every living being the upper parts – head, face – are the most beautiful, the mid and lower members inferior. In the UNIVERSE the middle and lower members are human beings; above them, the Heavens and the Gods that dwell there; these Gods with the entire circling expanse of the heavens constitute the greater part of the Kosmos: the earth is but a central point, and may be considered as simply one among the stars. Yet human wrong-doing is made a matter of wonder; we are evidently asked to take humanity as the choice member of the UNIVERSE, nothing wiser existent! Enneads III,2,

Again: it is childish, while we carry on all the affairs of our life to our own taste and not as the Gods would have us, to expect them to keep all well for us in spite of a life that is lived without regard to the conditions which the Gods have prescribed for our well-being. Yet death would be better for us than to go on living lives condemned by the laws of the UNIVERSE. If things took the contrary course, if all the modes of folly and wickedness brought no trouble in life – then indeed we might complain of the indifference of a Providence leaving the victory to evil. Enneads III,2,

It would not be just, because Providence cannot be a something reducing us to nothingness: to think of Providence as everything, with no other thing in existence, is to annihilate the UNIVERSE; such a providence could have no field of action; nothing would exist except the Divine. As things are, the Divine, of course, exists, but has reached forth to something other – not to reduce that to nothingness but to preside over it; thus in the case of Man, for instance, the Divine presides as the Providence, preserving the character of human nature, that is the character of a being under the providential law, which, again, implies subjection to what that law may enjoin. Enneads III,2,

Suppose this UNIVERSE were the direct creation of the Reason-Principle applying itself, quite unchanged, to Matter, retaining, that is, the hostility to partition which it derives from its Prior, the Intellectual Principle – then, this its product, so produced, would be of supreme and unparalleled excellence. But the Reason-Principle could not be a thing of entire identity or even of closely compact diversity; and the mode in which it is here manifested is no matter of censure since its function is to be all things, each single thing in some distinctive way. Enneads III,2,

This is why in the Over-World each entity is all, while here, below, the single thing is not all (is not the UNIVERSE but a “Self”). Thus too, a man, an individual, in so far as he is a part, is not Humanity complete: but wheresoever there is associated with the parts something that is no part (but a Divine, an Intellectual Being), this makes a whole of that in which it dwells. Man, man as partial thing, cannot be required to have attained to the very summit of goodness: if he had, he would have ceased to be of the partial order. Not that there is any grudging in the whole towards the part that grows in goodness and dignity; such an increase in value is a gain to the beauty of the whole; the lesser grows by being made over in the likeness of the greater, by being admitted, as it were, to something of that greatness, by sharing in that rank, and thus even from this place of man, from man’s own self, something gleams forth, as the stars shine in the divine firmament, so that all appears one great and lovely figure – living or wrought in the furnaces of craftsmanship – with stars radiant not only in the ears and on the brow but on the breasts too, and wherever else they may be displayed in beauty. Enneads III,2,

The Divine Reason is the beginning and the end; all that comes into being must be rational and fall at its coming into an ordered scheme reasonable at every point. Where, then, is the necessity of this bandit war of man and beast? This devouring of Kind by Kind is necessary as the means to the transmutation of living things which could not keep form for ever even though no other killed them: what grievance is it that when they must go their despatch is so planned as to be serviceable to others? Still more, what does it matter when they are devoured only to return in some new form? It comes to no more than the murder of one of the personages in a play; the actor alters his make-up and enters in a new role. The actor, of course, was not really killed; but if dying is but changing a body as the actor changes a costume, or even an exit from the body like the exit of the actor from the boards when he has no more to say or do, what is there so very dreadful in this transformation of living beings one into another? Surely it is much better so than if they had never existed: that way would mean the bleak quenching of life, precluded from passing outside itself; as the plan holds, life is poured copiously throughout a UNIVERSE, engendering the universal things and weaving variety into their being, never at rest from producing an endless sequence of comeliness and shapeliness, a living pastime. Enneads III,2,

Now in the case of music, tones high and low are the product of Reason-Principles which, by the fact that they are Principles of harmony, meet in the unit of Harmony, the absolute Harmony, a more comprehensive Principle, greater than they and including them as its parts. Similarly in the UNIVERSE at large we find contraries – white and black, hot and cold, winged and wingless, footed and footless, reasoning and unreasoning – but all these elements are members of one living body, their sum-total; the UNIVERSE is a self-accordant entity, its members everywhere clashing but the total being the manifestation of a Reason-Principle. That one Reason-Principle, then, must be the unification of conflicting Reason-Principles whose very opposition is the support of its coherence and, almost, of its Being. Enneads III,2,

Just so the Soul, entering this drama of the UNIVERSE, making itself a part of the Play, bringing to its acting its personal excellence or defect, set in a definite place at the entry and accepting from the author its entire role – superimposed upon its own character and conduct – just so, it receives in the end its punishment and reward. Enneads III,2,

But these actors, Souls, hold a peculiar dignity: they act in a vaster place than any stage: the Author has made them masters of all this world; they have a wide choice of place; they themselves determine the honour or discredit in which they are agents since their place and part are in keeping with their quality: they therefore fit into the Reason-Principle of the UNIVERSE, each adjusted, most legitimately, to the appropriate environment, as every string of the lyre is set in the precisely right position, determined by the Principle directing musical utterance, for the due production of the tones within its capacity. All is just and good in the UNIVERSE in which every actor is set in his own quite appropriate place, though it be to utter in the Darkness and in Tartarus the dreadful sounds whose utterance there is well. Enneads III,2,

This UNIVERSE is good not when the individual is a stone, but when everyone throws in his own voice towards a total harmony, singing out a life – thin, harsh, imperfect, though it be. The Syrinx does not utter merely one pure note; there is a thin obscure sound which blends in to make the harmony of Syrinx music: the harmony is made up from tones of various grades, all the tones differing, but the resultant of all forming one sound. Enneads III,2,

Similarly the Reason-Principle entire is One, but it is broken into unequal parts: hence the difference of place found in the UNIVERSE, better spots and worse; and hence the inequality of Souls, finding their appropriate surroundings amid this local inequality. The diverse places of this sphere, the Souls of unequal grade and unlike conduct, are wen exemplified by the distinction of parts in the Syrinx or any other instrument: there is local difference, but from every position every string gives forth its own tone, the sound appropriate, at once, to its particular place and to the entire plan. Enneads III,2,

The explanation, also, would take away all power in the UNIVERSE from Souls, even those nearest to the divine; they would all be mere parts of a Reason-Principle. Enneads III,2,

Circumstances are not sovereign over the good of life, for they are themselves moulded by their priors and come in as members of a sequence. The Leading-Principle holds all the threads while the minor agents, the individuals, serve according to their own capacities, as in a war the generalissimo lays down the plan and his subordinates do their best to its furtherance. The UNIVERSE has been ordered by a Providence that may be compared to a general; he has considered operations, conditions and such practical needs as food and drink, arms and engines of war; all the problem of reconciling these complex elements has been worked out beforehand so as to make it probable that the final event may be success. The entire scheme emerges from the general’s mind with a certain plausible promise, though it cannot cover the enemy’s operations, and there is no power over the disposition of the enemy’s forces: but where the mighty general is in question whose power extends over all that is, what can pass unordered, what can fail to fit into the plan? Enneads III,3,

Then the Reason-Principle has measured things out with the set purpose of inequality? Certainly not: the inequality is inevitable by the nature of things: the Reason-Principle of this UNIVERSE follows upon a phase of the Soul; the Soul itself follows upon an Intellectual Principle, and this Intellectual Principle is not one among the things of the UNIVERSE but is all things; in all things, there is implied variety of things; where there is variety and not identity there must be primals, secondaries, tertiaries and every grade downward. Forms of life, then, there must be that are not pure Soul but the dwindling of Souls enfeebled stage by stage of the process. There is, of course, a Soul in the Reason-Principle constituting a living being, but it is another Soul (a lesser phase), not that (the Supreme Soul) from which the Reason-Principle itself derives; and this combined vehicle of life weakens as it proceeds towards matter, and what it engenders is still more deficient. Consider how far the engendered stands from its origin and yet, what a marvel! Enneads III,3,

In sum, evil belongs to the sequence of things, but it comes from necessity. It originates in ourselves; it has its causes no doubt, but we are not, therefore, forced to it by Providence: some of these causes we adapt to the operation of Providence and of its subordinates, but with others we fail to make the connection; the act instead of being ranged under the will of Providence consults the desire of the agent alone or of some other element in the UNIVERSE, something which is either itself at variance with Providence or has set up some such state of variance in ourselves. Enneads III,3,

The living-being of the compound order is not present (as pure and simple Idea) like the living being of the Intellectual order: in the compound entity, we are aware, at once, of the Reason-Principle and of the inferior element brought under form. Now the UNIVERSE is such a compound living thing: to observe, therefore, its content is to be aware not less of its lower elements than of the Providence which operates within it. Enneads III,3,

These, then, are presented as mingled both by their initial nature and by the continuous process of their existence; and the Seer is not able to make a perfect discrimination setting on the one side Providence with all that happens under Providence and on the other side what the substrate communicates to its product. Such discrimination is not for a man, not for a wise man or a divine man: one may say it is the prerogative of a god. Not causes but facts lie in the Seer’s province; his art is the reading of the scriptures of Nature which tell of the ordered and never condescend to the disorderly; the movement of the UNIVERSE utters its testimony to him and, before men and things reveal themselves, brings to light what severally and collectively they are. Enneads III,3,

Here conspires with There and There with Here, elaborating together the consistency and eternity of a Kosmos and by their correspondences revealing the sequence of things to the trained observer – for every form of divination turns upon correspondences. Universal interdependence, there could not be, but universal resemblance there must. This probably is the meaning of the saying that Correspondences maintain the UNIVERSE. Enneads III,3,

And since the higher exists, there must be the lower as well. The UNIVERSE is a thing of variety, and how could there be an inferior without a superior or a superior without an inferior? We cannot complain about the lower in the higher; rather, we must be grateful to the higher for giving something of itself to the lower. Enneads III,3,

And the Soul of the All – are we to think that when it turns from this sphere its lower phase similarly withdraws? No: for it never accompanied that lower phase of itself; it never knew any coming, and therefore never came down; it remains unmoved above, and the material frame of the UNIVERSE draws close to it, and, as it were, takes light from it, no hindrance to it, in no way troubling it, simply lying unmoved before it. Enneads III,4,

But has the UNIVERSE, then, no sensation? “It has no Sight,” we read, since it has no eyes, and obviously it has not ears, nostrils, or tongue. Then has it perhaps such a consciousness as we have of our own inner conditions? No: where all is the working out of one nature, there is nothing but still rest; there is not even enjoyment. Sensibility is present as the quality of growth is, unrecognized. But the Nature of the World will be found treated elsewhere; what stands here is all that the question of the moment demands. Enneads III,4,

But besides this purest Soul, there must be also a Soul of the All: at once there is another Love – the eye with which this second Soul looks upwards – like the supernal Eros engendered by force of desire. This Aphrodite, the secondary Soul, is of this UNIVERSE – not Soul unmingled alone, not Soul, the Absolute, giving birth, therefore, to the Love concerned with the universal life; no, this is the Love presiding over marriages; but it, also, has its touch of the upward desire; and, in the degree of that striving, it stirs and leads upwards the Souls of the young and every Soul with which it is incorporated in so far as there is a natural tendency to remembrance of the divine. For every Soul is striving towards The Good, even the mingling Soul and that of particular beings, for each holds directly from the divine Soul, and is its offspring. Enneads III,5,

Does each individual Soul, then, contain within itself such a Love in essence and substantial reality? Since not only the pure All-Soul but also that of the UNIVERSE contain such a Love, it would be difficult to explain why our personal Soul should not. It must be so, even, with all that has life. Enneads III,5,

As the All-Soul contains the Universal Love, so must the single Soul be allowed its own single Love: and as closely as the single Soul holds to the All-Soul, never cut off but embraced within it, the two together constituting one principle of life, so the single separate Love holds to the All-Love. Similarly, the individual love keeps with the individual Soul as that other, the great Love, goes with the All-Soul; and the Love within the All permeates it throughout so that the one Love becomes many, showing itself where it chooses at any moment of the UNIVERSE, taking definite shape in these its partial phases and revealing itself at its will. Enneads III,5,

But to take Plato as meaning, by Eros, this UNIVERSE – and not simply the Love native within it – involves much that is self-contradictory. Enneads III,5,

Again, this Kosmos is a compound of body and soul; but Aphrodite to Plato is the Soul itself, therefore Aphrodite would necessarily – he a constituent part of Eros, dominant member! A man is the man’s Soul, if the world is, similarly, the world’s Soul, then Aphrodite, the Soul, is identical with Love, the Kosmos! And why should this one spirit, Love, be the UNIVERSE to the exclusion of all the others, which certainly are sprung from the same Essential-Being? Our only escape would be to make the Kosmos a complex of Supernals. Enneads III,5,

Love, again, is called the Dispenser of beautiful children: does this apply to the UNIVERSE? Love is represented as homeless, bedless and barefooted: would not that be a shabby description of the Kosmos and quite out of the truth? Enneads III,5,

Does the Intellectual Realm include no member of this spirit order, not even one? And does the Kosmos contain only these spirits, God being confined to the Intellectual? Or are there Gods in the sub-celestial too, the Kosmos itself being a God, the third, as is commonly said, and the Powers down to the Moon being all Gods as well? It is best not to use the word “Celestial” of any Being of that Realm; the word “God” may be applied to the Essential-Celestial – the autodaimon – and even to the Visible Powers of the UNIVERSE of Sense down to the Moon; Gods, these too, visible, secondary, sequent upon the Gods of the Intellectual Realm, consonant with Them, held about Them, as the radiance about the star. Enneads III,5,

But, first what prevents every one of the Celestials from being an Eros, a Love? And why are they not untouched by Matter like the Gods? On the first question: Every Celestial born in the striving of the Soul towards the good and beautiful is an Eros; and all the Souls within the Kosmos do engender this Celestial; but other Spirit-Beings, equally born from the Soul of the All, but by other faculties of that Soul, have other functions: they are for the direct service of the All, and administer particular things to the purpose of the UNIVERSE entire. The Soul of the All must be adequate to all that is and therefore must bring into being spirit powers serviceable not merely in one function but to its entire charge. Enneads III,5,

But what are we to understand by this Zeus with the garden into which, we are told, Poros or Wealth entered? And what is the garden? We have seen that the Aphrodite of the Myth is the Soul and that Poros, Wealth, is the Reason-Principle of the UNIVERSE: we have still to explain Zeus and his garden. Enneads III,5,

In a word, though Matter is far extended – so vastly as to appear co-extensive with all this sense-known UNIVERSE – yet if the Heavens and their content came to an end, all magnitude would simultaneously pass from Matter with, beyond a doubt, all its other properties; it would be abandoned to its own Kind, retaining nothing of all that which, in its own peculiar mode, it had hitherto exhibited. Enneads III,6,

Magnitude is not, like Matter, a receptacle; it is an Ideal-Principle: it is a thing standing apart to itself, not some definite Mass. The fact is that the self-gathered content of the Intellectual Principle or of the All-Soul, desires expansion (and thereby engenders secondaries): in its images – aspiring and moving towards it and eagerly imitating its act – is vested a similar power of reproducing their states in their own derivatives. The Magnitude latent in the expansive tendency of the Image-making phase (of Intellect or All-Soul) runs forth into the Absolute Magnitude of the UNIVERSE; this in turn enlists into the process the spurious magnitude of Matter: the content of the Supreme, thus, in virtue of its own prior extension enables Matter – which never possesses a content – to exhibit the appearance of Magnitude. It must be understood that spurious Magnitude consists in the fact that a thing (Matter) not possessing actual Magnitude strains towards it and has the extension of that straining. All that is Real Being gives forth a reflection of itself upon all else; every Reality, therefore, has Magnitude which by this process is communicated to the UNIVERSE. Enneads III,6,

But would we not expect that some one particularized form should occupy Matter (at once) and so exclude such others as are not able to enter into combination? No: for there is no first Idea except the Ideal Principle of the UNIVERSE – and, by this Idea, Matter is (the seat of) all things at once and of the particular thing in its parts – for the Matter of a living being is disparted according to the specific parts of the organism: if there were no such partition nothing would exist but the Reason-Principle. Enneads III,6,

What definition are we to give to Eternity? Can it be identified with the (divine or) Intellectual Substance itself? This would be like identifying Time with the UNIVERSE of Heavens and Earth – an opinion, it is true, which appears to have had its adherents. No doubt we conceive, we know, Eternity as something most august; most august, too, is the Intellectual Kind; and there is no possibility of saying that the one is more majestic than the other, since no such degrees can be asserted in the Above-World; there is therefore a certain excuse for the identification – all the more since the Intellectual Substance and Eternity have the one scope and content. Enneads III,7,

The phrase “He was good” (used by Plato of the Demiurge) refers to the Idea of the All; and its very indefiniteness signifies the utter absense of relation to Time: so that even this UNIVERSE has had no temporal beginning; and if we speak of something “before” it, that is only in the sense of the Cause from which it takes its Eternal Existence. Plato used the word merely for the convenience of exposition, and immediately corrects it as inappropriate to the order vested with the Eternity he conceives and affirms. Enneads III,7,

What would then exist but Eternity? All would remain in unity; how could there be any diversity of things? What Earlier or Later would there be, what long-lasting or short-lasting? What ground would lie ready to the Soul’s operation but the Supreme in which it has its Being? Or, indeed, what operative tendency could it have even to That since a prior separation is the necessary condition of tendency? The very sphere of the UNIVERSE would not exist; for it cannot antedate Time: it, too, has its Being and its Movement in Time; and if it ceased to move, the Soul-Act (which is the essence of Time) continuing, we could measure the period of its Repose by that standard outside it. Enneads III,7,

If, then, the Soul withdrew, sinking itself again into its primal unity, Time would disappear: the origin of Time, clearly, is to be traced to the first stir of the Soul’s tendency towards the production of the sensible universe with the consecutive act ensuing. This is how “Time” – as we read – “came into Being simultaneously” with this All: the Soul begot at once the UNIVERSE and Time; in that activity of the Soul this UNIVERSE sprang into being; the activity is Time, the UNIVERSE is a content of Time. No doubt it will be urged that we read also of the orbit of the Stars being Times”: but do not forget what follows; “the stars exist,” we are told, “for the display and delimitation of Time,” and “that there may be a manifest Measure.” No indication of Time could be derived from (observation of) the Soul; no portion of it can be seen or handled, so it could not be measured in itself, especially when there was as yet no knowledge of counting; therefore the Soul brings into being night and day; in their difference is given Duality – from which, we read, arises the concept of Number. Enneads III,7,

The primal phase of the Soul – inhabitant of the Supreme and, by its participation in the Supreme, filled and illuminated – remains unchangeably There; but in virtue of that first participation, that of the primal participant, a secondary phase also participates in the Supreme, and this secondary goes forth ceaselessly as Life streaming from Life; for energy runs through the UNIVERSE and there is no extremity at which it dwindles out. But, travel as far as it may, it never draws that first part of itself from the place whence the outgoing began: if it did, it would no longer be everywhere (its continuous Being would be broken and) it would be present at the end, only, of its course. Enneads III,8,

In sum, then: The Soul is to extend throughout the UNIVERSE, no spot void of its energy: but, a prior is always different from its secondary, and energy is a secondary, rising as it must from contemplation or act; act, however, is not at this stage existent since it depends upon contemplation: therefore the Soul, while its phases differ, must, in all of them, remain a contemplation and what seems to be an act done under contemplation must be in reality that weakened contemplation of which we have spoken: the engendered must respect the Kind, but in weaker form, dwindled in the descent. Enneads III,8,

In its character as Life, as emanation, as containing all things in their precise forms and not merely in the agglomerate mass – for this would be to contain them imperfectly and inarticulately – it must of necessity derive from some other Being, from one that does not emanate but is the Principle of Emanation, of Life, of Intellect and of the UNIVERSE. Enneads III,8,

For the UNIVERSE is not a Principle and Source: it springs from a source, and that source cannot be the All or anything belonging to the All, since it is to generate the All, and must be not a plurality but the Source of plurality, since universally a begetting power is less complex than the begotten. Thus the Being that has engendered the Intellectual-Principle must be more simplex than the Intellectual-Principle. Enneads III,8,

And what will such a Principle essentially be? The potentiality of the UNIVERSE: the potentiality whose non-existence would mean the non-existence of all the UNIVERSE and even of the Intellectual-Principle which is the primal Life and all Life. Enneads III,8,

This Principle on the thither side of Life is the cause of Life – for that Manifestation of Life which is the UNIVERSE of things is not the First Activity; it is itself poured forth, so to speak, like water from a spring. Enneads III,8,

But: As one that looks up to the heavens and sees the splendour of the stars thinks of the Maker and searches, so whoever has contemplated the Intellectual UNIVERSE and known it and wondered for it must search after its Maker too. What Being has raised so noble a fabric? And where? And how? Who has begotten such a child, this Intellectual-Principle, this lovely abundance so abundantly endowed? The Source of all this cannot be an Intellect; nor can it be an abundant power: it must have been before Intellect and abundance were; these are later and things of lack; abundance had to be made abundant and Intellection needed to know. Enneads III,8,

This, then, is the Being which planned to create in the lower UNIVERSE what it saw existing in the Supreme, the four orders of living beings. Enneads III,8,

At no point did the All-Soul come into Being: it never arrived, for it never knew place; what happens is that body, neighbouring with it, participates in it: hence Plato does not place Soul in body but body in Soul. The others, the secondary Souls, have a point of departure – they come from the All-Soul – and they have a Place into which to descend and in which to change to and fro, a place, therefore, from which to ascend: but this All-Soul is for ever Above, resting in that Being in which it holds its existence as Soul and followed, as next, by the UNIVERSE or, at least, by all beneath the sun. Enneads III,8,

But, we need not record in memory all we see; mere incidental concomitants need not occupy the imagination; when things vividly present to intuition, or knowledge, happen to occur in concrete form, it is not necessary – unless for purposes of a strictly practical administration – to pass over that direct acquaintance, and fasten upon the partial sense-presentation, which is already known in the larger knowledge, that of the UNIVERSE. Enneads IV,4,

The UNIVERSE is immensely varied, the container of all the Reason-Principles and of infinite and diverse efficacies. In man, we are told, the eye has its power, and the bones have their varied powers, and so with each separate part of hand and of foot; and there is no member or organ without its own definite function, some separate power of its own – a diversity of which we can have no notion unless our studies take that direction. What is true of man must be true of the universe, and much more, since all this order is but a representation of the higher: it must contain an untellably wonderful variety of powers, with which, of course, the bodies moving through the heavens will be most richly endowed. Enneads IV,4,

But what can it be which is loftier than that existence – a life compact of wisdom, untouched by struggle and error, or than this Intellect which holds the UNIVERSE with all there is of life and intellect? If we answer “The Making Principle,” there comes the question, “making by what virtue?” and unless we can indicate something higher there than in the made, our reasoning has made no advance: we rest where we were. Enneads V,3,

Bring this vision actually before your sight, so that there shall be in your mind the gleaming representation of a sphere, a picture holding sprung, themselves, of that universe and repose or some at rest, some in motion. Keep this sphere before you, and from it imagine another, a sphere stripped of magnitude and of spatial differences; cast out your inborn sense of Matter, taking care not merely to attenuate it: call on God, maker of the sphere whose image you now hold, and pray Him to enter. And may He come bringing His own UNIVERSE with all the Gods that dwell in it – He who is the one God and all the gods, where each is all, blending into a unity, distinct in powers but all one god in virtue of that one divine power of many facets. Enneads V,8,

We must begin on these lines: The subject of our discussion is the Sensible realm: Sensible Existence is entirely embraced by what we know as the UNIVERSE: our duty, then, would seem to be clear enough – to take this UNIVERSE and analyse its nature, classifying its constituent parts and arranging them by species. Suppose that we were making a division of speech: we should reduce its infinity to finite terms, and from the identity appearing in many instances evolve a unity, then another and another, until we arrived at some definite number; each such unit we should call a species if imposed upon individuals, a genus if imposed upon species. Thus, every species of speech – and similarly all phenomena – might be referred to a unity; speech – or element – might be predicated of them all. Enneads VI,3,

This procedure however is as we have already shown, impossible in dealing with the subject of our present enquiry. New genera must be sought for this UNIVERSE-genera distinct from those of the Intellectual, inasmuch as this realm is different from that, analogous indeed but never identical, a mere image of the higher. True, it involves the parallel existence of Body and Soul, for the UNIVERSE is a living form: essentially however Soul is of the Intellectual and does not enter into the structure of what is called Sensible Being. Enneads VI,3,

Differentiation by form or shape is no more out of place than a division based on qualities – heat, cold and the like. If it be objected that qualities go to make bodies what they are, then, we reply, so do blendings, colours, shapes. Since our discussion is concerned with Sensible Substance, it is not strange that it should turn upon distinctions related to sense-perception: this Substance is not Being pure and simple, but the Sensible Being which we call the UNIVERSE. Enneads VI,3,

This does not mean that Man Absolute, or any Absolute, or the UNIVERSE in the sense of a Whole, is absorbed by multiplicity; on the contrary, the multiplicity is absorbed by the Absolute, or rather is bound up with it. There is a difference between the mode in which a colour may be absorbed by a substance entire and that in which the soul of the individual is identically present in every part of the body: it is in this latter mode that Being is omnipresent. Enneads VI,5,